ORIGINALLY POSTED 15th February 2008

6,559 views on developerworks

I was pointed to an article on TechTarget by Tory Skyers where he vents his frustration / asks what aren’t people making products that will solve their data migration issues.

Whether he’s been looking at software or backup solutions, and missed the key killer app that storage virtualization… he asks :

If you sense some irritation on my part, you’re spot on. While it may not directly affect me, it most certainly does affect those who rely on my expertise. I’d like to be able to say “Hey, just get Product X from Vendor Y and it will take care of at least 60% of your migration woes.”

My answer is “Hey, just get SVC from IBM and it will take care of 100% of your migration woes”

He talks of cost, and a base pair of SVC nodes – more than enough for most SMB’s – won’t set you back anywhere near the $50,000 he mentions.

Once virtualized behind SVC, all data migrations can be performed while maintaining online I/O access to the server applications. Just ask any of our reference customers, for example removing a 3 month phase out, phase in cycle of old to new storage, perform it during the day, over a couple of days and you can easily move from one controller to another – then extract the old controller. This is always seen as the killer app for the guys on the ground.

While Tory wants a real combined ILM, policy based data destroyer, SVC does only provide the data migration at a block level today, therefore its not going to solve all his needs, but its certainly going to make the data movement much much much less painful.

However, not only will you get the data-migration benefits, but you get the day to day storage virtualization benefits. Consolidation of your storage arrays, reduced complexity of management of all those small boxes, their mapping to hosts, and any copy services you use – all bundled under one single interface, provisioning methodology and if you need them a consistent set of copy services over all your storage. Not to mention the likely performance boosts SVC can provide when fronting entry and mid-range products.